Skip to main content

Review: Inception or Royal Road To Your Skull

Watching a movie is like dreaming in the dark with eyes wide open.  This oneiric element of film has a long tradition.  I had planned to write a lengthy, somewhat academic, and very clever review of Inception, the new Christopher Nolan blockbuster about dream-spies - one that would reference Freud, Lacan, Kubrick, Welles, - you name it.  I am less sure I need to now.

Having read Cosmo Landesman's review in The Sunday Times, I think we concur on the following: 1. Inception's representation of dreams, and dream states, is unconvincing - a weird mistake, since everyone dreams and will recognise this problem - in the sense that the film refrains entirely from any sexual or much repressed or symbolic content in the dreams; and also, presents very few non-linear (non-narrative) episodes.  2. The film's filmic references to Kubrick and Welles (i.e. the new Rosebud in the safe at the end, the Lady from Shanghai mirror references, Mr Arkadin billionaire-quest plot), Hitchcock (Vertigo etc), and Francis Bacon (in the bath) - are visually clever, but perhaps too obvious, as is the Ken Adam-style winter HQ. 3.  The movie is yet another Leo flick with a dead wife where what is real is uncertain, and questioned using the medium of film - perhaps one too many.  4. It is self-important to the extent that it becomes boring at times, and almost insanely complex.

On the up side, it has some fun Cronenberg moments, where the dream-thieves are like junkies, seeking "kicks", and the Ouspenskyian swirl of time and place becomes deliriously funhouse madcap.  It is also ambitious for a Hollywood movie, in that it tries to explore emotions, ideas, film history, and suspense, as well as violence.  Unfortunately, it is not the amazingly mind-blowing cultural moment that The Matrix was.  However, by beginning and ending the film with a "surf-tormented shore" from the Edgar Poe poem, "A Dream Within A Dream", on which the film's central agon is based, it has the credentials to be deemed poetic.  And that is worth celebrating.

Further, a few gags ("you mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger"), a speeding train down a main street, some floating bodies in an elevator, the stirring Hans Zimmer score, and a nice role for Tom Berenger, add value to the whole.  On a last point (spoiler alert): the film's twist is in the title - it's "Rosebud" being that the "Inception" is Nolan's, on us, the audience - planting in our minds doubt as to whether what we have seen is "real" or not - clever since, within the film-as-film, at all layers, it is actually filmic artifice, yet at stake is the main character trying to break out of that (by dying and rebirth) into actuality.  See Deleuze for the way in which the filmic can be seen as a becoming.

Comments

Jack Underwood said…
Are the references too obvious? I'm adverse to the idea of an 'obvious' reference anyway, since allusion is speculative and subjective (it takes one to know one basically!) and I didn't feel these things were relied upon to communicate any central idea (apart from perhaps that like dreams, films are absorbent and sort of rerefential). I thought the film was a real triumph in terms of drama and twists. While it may be interesting to vivisect on intertextual terms, was there not something pop-corn munchingly gorgeous about suddenly not knowing what the fuck was going on but still feeling utterly gripped by what might happen? I'm not a great film watcher, so perhaps these references fell dead on me. I just thought it was jolly good fun, no?

As for whether 'Inception' described dreams accurately, well you're right, it didn't. But we're watching a work of science fiction, and like nearly all works of the genre, it is a currently unavailable technology that drives the plot, or frames the 'new question', to be explored in the film. Here we are being told we can consciously access the unconscious which is a paradox, but this new science fiction technology overcomes the gap and allows us to do so. It would be impossible for any conscious text to successfully portray the unconscious dream world, but since we suspend disbelief in order to accommodate a new technology which allows this great impossible to take place, so we must not question the validity of further aspects, since they are already framed in doubt, unbelievability.

I thought it better than the Matrix. It had a nice complex, human core to it- a kind of love poem with a bendy Paris, guns and car chases in.
EYEWEAR said…
Jack, great to have your thoughtful comments here. I sort of agree with you, it was a hoot. Maybe I was a little tired when I saw it - a later showing on Friday. Still, I can't help feeling the "Hollywood-hetero" love story at the heart of the film is not so much a love poem as a postcard from a clicheville - I mean, how the Beatrice/Maltese Falcon he seeks is the vision of two perfect little girls in a garden. These films are always marred for me by the need to include family values - so, Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds has to be a great dad; - again, in Shutter Island. Why not throw a curvevall at us sometime, and give us a hero who doesn't want to end up in the burbs with 2.5 kids and a Mazda - who is driven by genuine demons that are not sanitised but some sort of "pat the dog" normalacy. Not to vent or anything. (-:
Unknown said…
I agree with you Todd. Overall, the film left me cold but I wonder if that is because my expectations were for it to be superior to your typical Hollywood blockbuster fare. That central conceit, that is supposed to keep us wondering for days after the film: are we dreaming? what is reality? is a little feeble in my view. The 'grief' element, which is potentially interesting, was handled in such a heavy-handed manner that I was just fed up by the time of the utterly predictable 'big reveal'.

Argh, I'm just so frustrated with it for being dull and unimaginative when it kept on showing under the glitter the potential to be rather special.

Sorry Inception fans, I think I'm a lost cause.

Popular posts from this blog

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise...